Smarter Contact SMS Marketing
Wholesaler · Baton Rouge, LA · Member since 2008 · 471 posts · 98 votes
What's the general opinion of BP members about the viability of Smarter Contact SMS marketing?
It's really expensive and you have to add the balance all the time which is annoying. What works well for me and my investors is Launch Control and Batchleads. Less expensive and more productive in my opinion.
It's really expensive and you have to add the balance all the time which is annoying. What works well for me and my investors is Launch Control and Batchleads. Less expensive and more productive in my opinion.
It's really expensive and you have to add the balance all the time which is annoying. What works well for me and my investors is Launch Control and Batchleads. Less expensive and more productive in my opinion.
Glad to hear you're having success with those software. How much does BatchLeads cost you per month? I know it depends on how many messages you send daily, but I just want to get a general idea. Im looking into SMS software and am curious. Thank you!
Over the past three years, I’ve been using most of the major off-market techniques.
Of all the methods, texting has been a double-edged sword. It often feels like a constant game of cat and mouse with phone carriers. While it’s relatively simple and can help you find deals, it’s also time-consuming. You still need to qualify leads, and the carrier obstructions that come and go can derail your momentum. If I had to choose, I would always prefer cold calling over texting for this approach.
The two best strategies I’ve found are inbound methods: direct mail and Google Ads.
Direct mail can be expensive, but it can also yield highly discounted properties.
Google Ads, on the other hand, doesn’t require data extraction like calls, direct mail, or texting. However, it does demand solid digital marketing expertise to achieve positive results.
I've never used that platform. We've been using Launch control for about 3 years now and have had a good experience with it.
It looks like with all outbound texting platforms, the main thing is staying compliant, and that varies by state. For example, I know Texas is much stricter, and from my understanding, you really should not be doing SMS marketing there unless you’ve fully handled the compliance side.
In a lot of other states, the biggest things are making sure people have a clear opt out option and honoring it immediately if they reply with “stop” or something similar. That part is huge.
The other side is making sure your templates are compliant with the phone carriers themselves. A lot of it comes down to wording and avoiding phrases that get flagged. So instead of saying something like, “Do you want to hear an offer on your home?” we’ve learned to phrase it differently, like, “Would you be open to a proposal on your property?” Small wording changes like that can make a big difference with deliverability and compliance.
used a bunch of these over the years, Launch Control, REI Reply, others. honestly for out of the box Smarter Contact was the one that felt most dialed in, deliverability was solid and the interface just made sense. the compliance stuff Izaiah mentioned is real though, wording matters a lot more than people think.
eventually moved away from all of them and built my own custom setup on the backend, works way better for how i actually operate but Smarter Contact was the best off the shelf option i used before going that route
Smarter Contact works but the cost-per-conversation is brutal once you factor in opt-outs and carrier filtering getting worse every month.
I've been running cold calling operations for REI investors for a while now and honestly the phone still wins when it comes to actual conversations with motivated sellers. SMS gets you responses, but half of them are "stop texting me" cold calling gets you a real human telling you why they need to sell.
The sweet spot I've seen work is cold calling first to qualify, then SMS as a follow-up touchpoint for the ones who were interested but not ready. Using SMS as the primary outreach is getting harder to scale profitably.
What market are you in Robert? Some markets the response rates vary a lot.
@Muhammad Sabeeh @Yogev Lifchin @Izaiah Barba @Rauph Souleimanov @Aly Mahfouz This thread is really highlighting the core economics problem nobody wants to address directly.
Aly nailed it — "cost-per-conversation is brutal." But here's what makes it even worse: that cost-per-conversation number assumes you're texting people who actually have a reason to sell. If you're texting a purchased list of 200 names at $0.05-0.10 per message, most of those texts are going to people who were never motivated in the first place. Your cost-per-conversation looks bad because your cost-per-qualified-conversation is astronomical.
Izaiah's point about wording is spot on — "Would you be open to a proposal on your property?" versus "Do you want to hear an offer?" — but even perfect wording doesn't fix the problem when the person receiving the text has zero reason to engage. They weren't motivated before the text and they're not motivated after.
Yogev's recommendation of inbound methods over outbound texting is the right instinct, but there's a free alternative that's even better than Google Ads or direct mail: county public records. Before spending money on any SMS platform, pull three county databases:
1. County Tax Collector — tax delinquent properties (financial stress, county documents it at $0 cost to you)
2. City Code Enforcement — violations with dollar-amount repair costs from county inspectors (physical stress — "$12K structural repair," "$8.5K roof replacement" — the inspector already wrote the scope of work)
3. County Clerk of Court — probate filings, liens, pre-foreclosure (legal complexity)
When all three converge on the same property, you have a confirmed motivated seller with documented problems across three independent government databases. Now your SMS message becomes: "I'm reaching out about the property with the code enforcement violation for the structural issue — the county inspector documented $12K in repairs. I also see the tax delinquency. Are you the owner?"
That's a completely different text than "Would you be open to a proposal on your property?" The person receiving it immediately knows you did homework that 50 other wholesalers didn't do. Your cost-per-conversation drops because you're only texting 10-15 properties where three county databases confirmed motivation — not 200 purchased-list leads where maybe 15-20 are actually motivated.
Rauph — when you built your custom backend, what data source is feeding it? Purchased lists or county records? Because the platform question (Smarter Contact vs Launch Control vs custom) matters less than what's going INTO the platform.